On Sunday 16 June 2002 22:35, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > head, tail, tr and wc are certainly necessary for booting. Are those the > ones which you replaced with asmutils?
I'm able to boot without head, tail, tr and wc . If you have a spare filesystem you can trash you could test it yourself. I have put the deb on http://oxtan.campus.luth.se/debian/ . The package will probably not install unless you remove all Essential tags, and is still be buggy as hell. But it is booting at home, and I can install packages. Remember, this is a proof of the consept package. Not intended for general usage. > > Most of the things that you listed are quite small (especially the > scripts), and don't justify splitting the package that contains them. But if we sum many small the end result might be worth while, se statistics below. > There is, of course, nothing stopping a user from deleting those programs > if they do not use them. While they certainly can delete them they would have to be very brave indeed. Since they cannot possibly know if another program in the distro depends on the program they delete. > I would expect these to be links to grep; I wonder why they are not. You > may want to ask the maintainer about tihs. I will , but I think this is post woody stuff =) > As I understand it, booting is not the only requirement for making > something Essential. Essential packages are treated differently in other > circumstances as well, for example by dpkg. While that may be, I am certainly not getting wiser by this. Are there some documentation/references, please? > It is also not worthwhile to split packages at the finest possible > granularity, just to support users who can do without certain components. > The benefit must justify the additional cost of packaging and maintaining > the critical programs which coexist with the non-critical ones, and not > overcomplicating essential infrastructure. True, but even for the Zaurus I think the effort is worth while in the long term. And we must remember that Zaurus is a high end PDA. It would be sad if we put a lot of work in the Zaurus that would have to be redone for another PDA. Package: asmutils-req (some assembler, some busybox, some original progs) Installed-Size: 358k Replaces: gzip, e2fsprogs, grep, bsdutils, hostname, shellutils, textutils, util-linux, fileutils Installed-Size: 7688k the reduction in size is ~95%, and I think 7330k is worth the effort. And thats only what I can do. I think that the 14 debian essential maintainers can do a lot better. They have indepth knowledge on their packages and probably know some additional tweaks. -- Magnus Ekdahl 0739-287181 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] public key available at http://oxtan.campus.luth.se/magnus.public ftp://ftp.se.debian.org/debian-non-US/pool/non-US/main/d/debian-keyring/ Key fingerprint = 18DE CB62 8A86 374E 824E 09ED 1987 4B18 1213 79F6 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
